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    <title>Book Buying Review and Flowchart</title>
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  <h1>Review of the Book Buying Process</h1>
  <p><a href="index.html">Home</a></p>
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  <img src="images/flowchart.png" style="width:332px; height:931;  "  
     alt="Flow chart showing the book buying process"/>
     <br />Figure 1: Flowchart<br />
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  <h3>The Well Designed Part</h3>
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        The shopping bag is easy to use and has a simple design. There is not too much clutter.<br /><br />
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          <img src="images/shopping_cart.png" style="width:628px; height:560;" alt="Shopping Cart"/>
          <br />Figure 2: Shopping Cart<br /><br />
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      </li>
      <li>The checkout process is pretty well laid out. The steps in the process are clearly identifiable by numbered circles in the top right portion of each page. The current step is a filled in circle. This presumes that the user is familiar with the multi-step checkout process, though. Someone new to the process might not pick up on what the circles mean as they are not labeled as such.
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          <br /><img src="images/checkout_step2.png" style="width:761px; height:690;" alt="Step 2 of the checkout process"/>
          <br />Figure 3: Checkout Step 2<br /><br />
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      </li>
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  <h3>The Not So Well Designed Part</h3>
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      <li>Step 2 can be pretty frustrating for return customers. Apparently the site does not retain billing or shipping information for registered users. You have to fill out all of the data each time you place an order (see Figure 3 above). It would be better if the site retained the information and prefilled the form fields.
      </li>
      <li>Based on the process in the steps, it appears that once the credit card information is put in and the user presses the NEXT button, they are presented with an order confirmation. It does not appear that the user is given the chance to review all order details and make changes before the order is submitted. This feature should be added. I could not tell for sure about this because I did not want to actually buy a book and so did not complete the process past step 3. However, in the FAQ section it says that once the credit card data is entered and the next step begins, the order has been placed.
      </li>  
      <li>One other general comment about the poorly designed portion of the site is that it is done entirely in tables. This would not be so bad except that all of the formatting is using the HTML inline attributes instead of CSS making it a nightmare to edit.
      </li>
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